They know where you live

NEXT time a small mountain of junk mail falls on the doormat or you answer the phone to someone selling double glazing, blame the bureaucrats. Local authorities and government agencies rake in £50m a year by selling the personal information they keep on your household.

This information - your address, who you live with, how much you paid for your home and how long you've lived there - is gold dust to banks, insurers, credit card companies and utilities providers seeking customers.

A credit card company will pay up to £50,000 for access to every electoral roll, for instance.

The overall volume of direct mail being sent by private companies has ballooned by 87% in the past ten years. Last year, more than fourbn items were posted to households.

This volume, say marketing analysts, is expected to grow. One of the main drivers is the Government's move toward storing information on easily accessible, and saleable, electronic databases.

The register of births, marriages and deaths is being computerised and Labour's planned identity cards will result in the biggest ever database of information on every UK adult.

Though the Government has said data from ID cards will not be passed on to private companies, civil liberties groups warn that there is no safeguard that subsequent governments will not do so.

Shami Chakrabarti, director at Liberty, says: 'There is a wealth of information out there on everyone. Every time you make a commercial transaction, data is collected. The value in government data lies in the fact that it is official and correct because individuals have supplied it themselves. Our fear is that while the Government has made assurances that ID card information won't be sold on, there are no guarantees that future governments won't succumb.'

There are ways to reduce the amount of unsolicited marketing calls and junk mail that you receive, but it is difficult to block it completely. You can make a start by ticking a box the next time you fill in the electoral roll form. It states that you do not want your data to be passed on to third parties.

Mike Hare, managing director of a privacy service My Right To Be Private, says this alone will do little to help. 'The tick-box on electoral roll forms was only introduced a few years ago,' he points out. 'Many people are already on thousands of marketing lists, so even if the local authorities stop passing on your details in new lists, it isn't difficult for marketing companies to cross check with other databases to find out that you still live at the same address.'

Signing up to the mail, phone, fax and e-mail preference services is free. It takes about a month to become active, but it puts you on a register that states you do not want to receive unsolicited marketing mail, calls, faxes or e-mails.

All companies are obliged to check the phone and fax preference registers and are forbidden by law to contact names and numbers on it. However, it cannot prevent randomly generated marketing calls made by computers or calls from companies based outside the UK.

Also, the mail preference service is not compulsory and some companies will ignore it. 'The only sure-fire way to stop junk mail is to call the companies directly and ask them to take you off their mailing list,' says Hare, whose firm charges £16.99 to do this for consumers.

The weight of the QE2 through the post every year

DIRECT marketing through phone calls and unsolicited mail drops is one of the fastest growing areas of advertising. The average household receives 14 items of direct mail every four weeks, according to the Direct Mail Information Service.

That amounts to a total of 4.2bn items of junk mail posted to consumers in the UK each year. And that is more than 70,000 tonnes of junk mail - the same weight as the cruise liner the Queen Elizabeth 2 - dropping through our letter boxes every 12 months.

While banks, insurers and credit card providers are reining in general advertising budgets, they have boosted their spending on direct mail by almost 20% since 2000. It is now £2.5bn a year, says the information service.

Credit card giant Capital One, one of the biggest senders of junk mail among financial companies, spent £61m on advertising in the year to April 2005, according to a survey by Nielsen Media. Its next rival in expenditure terms is card firm MBNA, which spent £46m in the same period.

Estimates suggest that 60% of this cash went towards direct mailing. Capital One's mailings, which are frequently criticised for recklessly encouraging borrowers to take on unaffordable debts, usually include gimmicks such as fake plastic cards and ballpoint pens.

Paul Steedman, researcher in the National Consumer Council's sustainable consumption department says it is a terrible waste of resources. 'It gobbles up am trees, more than 500m gallons of water and 30m gallons of oil,' he says.

'Signing up to the mail preference service not only removes the nuisance of junk mail, it is the most important thing you can do to reduce the impact of junk mail on the environment.'